Canonical has been working on its vision of complete OS convergence for quite a while now and the first results have already appeared, but it seems that Microsoft is also trying to do the same and it has called it Universal Apps.

The Ubuntu Phone is set to launch this year. With more and more major players getting on board as hardware suppliers, you can bet the darling of Linux mobility will slowly find its way into every market imaginable. The big question mark is the US market. With Android and IOS having a stranglehold on US customers, can this new mobile platform make it? I firmly believe that the Ubuntu Phone not only can be your next mobile device, it should be. I’ll give you 10 reasons why.

No, they’re not kidding. As Sally Radwan, Canonical’s cloud product marketing manager, recently explained, “A few years ago, the cloud team at Canonical decided that the future of cloud computing lies not only in what clouds are built on, but what runs on it, and how quickly, securely, and efficiently those services can be managed. This is when Juju was born; our service orchestration tool built for the cloud and inspired by the way IT architects visualize their infrastructure: boxes representing services, connected by lines representing interfaces or relationships. Juju’s GUI simplifies searching, dragging and dropping a ‘Charm’ into a canvas to deploy services instantly.”

“An example of Ubuntu convergence in action. Here you see the Weather Channel powered Ubuntu weather app first the size of a phone, then a tablet, then desktop, and the content all re-aligns to make the very best use of the space. We then shrink the app back down and everything continues to adjust. All from a single code base,” wrote Jono Bacon on Google+.

I remember, when the good folks at Canonical introduced the Ubuntu tour feature on their website, I wished for there to be a way to access my Ubuntu desktop via a browser for real. Although it is possible to use VNC clients to remotely access your Ubuntu desktop from anywhere including your Android phone, it would be sure good to be able to access your desktop from any computing device without having to install a client side application.

Many of us had hoped it was an April Fool’s prank. But Ubuntu One will, in fact, no longer be available as of June 1, 2014 and all data will be wiped July 31, 2014. This will leave a great number of Ubuntu users without a cloud service. Fear not, intrepid users, there are plenty of cloud services and tools available – each with native Linux clients – ready and willing to take your Ubuntu One data and keep it in the cloud.

Ubuntu One always struck me as Canonical’s attempt to emulate Apple and other companies by offering a cloud-based file storage and music service. I’ve often wondered how well it was doing in terms of users and if it was making Canonical any money. Alas, Ubuntu One is no more according to the Canonical Blog. So I guess that answers those questions.

Canonical got a lot of flak over the years for the decisions regarding its Ubuntu operating system, some of them justified, but most were just unfair. The truth is not in the middle as you might think because there are much bigger interests at play.

Canonical has had a rocky relationship at times with the rest of the open source community. The company has sometimes gone in its own direction and rather blithely disregarded criticism from others in free software. Datamation takes a look at the root of Canonical’s problem and thinks that it’s more about relationships than it is about specific software issues.

For system administrators or those just wishing to dive into the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS kernel to see how it differs from a vanilla Linux 3.13 configuration, Leann Ogasawara of Canonical has posted a mailing list message with various resources that outline the patches they’re carrying with their 3.13-based kernel, their kernel configuration, the configuration against Ubuntu 13.10, etc.

Stay tuned for the NVIDIA and Intel results that will accompany the AMD Radeon performance numbers in the days ahead. Overall, the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS open graphics experience is decent with Linux 3.13 and Mesa 10.2-devel although Linux gamers and enthusiasts are encouraged to either use the proprietary drivers or at least upgrade to the latest Linux kernel (3.14+) and Mesa 10.2-devel for the best OpenGL performance and best feature-set.

Download Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr here. For the first time, every flavour of Ubuntu 14.04 (Desktop, Server, Edubuntu, Lubuntu, etc) has been approved for LTS status, meaning they’ll all be supported for a minimum of three years, and some of them will be supported for five.

The next version of the world’s preeminent Linux distro, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, is almost upon us. Late last night, the final beta of 14.04 Trusty Tahr (an African wild goat) was released, with the final build due on April 17. Trusty Tahr is the first long-term support (LTS) build of Ubuntu in two years, and is thus contains a lot of exciting features that thousands (millions?) of Ubuntu 12.04 users can’t wait to get their hands on.

There were hopes that the Linux 3.14 kernel would make it into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS given that it has much better Intel Broadwell graphics support, other new hardware enablement, and a ton of new features. Sadly, it looks like only the Linux 3.13 kernel will be shipped by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Fortunately, with the new hardware enablement strategy of Ubuntu Long Term Support releases, in 14.04.1 or 14.04.2 we will see a new kernel (along with Mesa/X components) back-ported from later release series.

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